Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

eware the passionate robot 365
such as language and cognition has enabled a two-way street for
emotion.
Rolls (Chapter 5) emphasizes diverse roles of the amygdala in the monkey.
Monkey amygdala receives information about primary reinforcers (e.g.,
taste and touch) and about visual and auditory stimuli from higher cortical
areas (e.g., inferior temporal cortex) that can be associated by learning with
primary reinforcers (Fig. 12.5). Monkeys will work in order to obtain electrical
stimulation of the amygdala; single neurons in the amygdala are activated
by brain-stimulation reward of a number of different sites, and some
amygdala neurons respond mainly to rewarding stimuli and others to punishing
stimuli. There are neurons in the amygdala (e.g., in the basal accessory
nucleus) which respond primarily to faces; they may be related to
inferring the emotional content of facial expressions. Moreover, the human
amygdala can be activated in neuroimaging studies by observing facial expressions,
and lesions of the human amygdala may cause difficulty in the
identification of some such expressions (see Rolls, 2000).
Figure 12.5 also suggests the crucial role of the orbitofrontal cortex in
linking the frontal cortex to the emotional system. It receives inputs from
the inferior temporal visual cortex and superior temporal auditory cortex;
From Somatosensory cortex
Figure 12.5. Some of the pathways involved in emotion shown on a lateral view
of the brain of the macaque monkey, emphasizing connections from the
primary taste and olfactory cortices and from the inferior temporal cortex to
the orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala. The secondary taste cortex and the
secondary olfactory cortex are within the orbitofrontal cortex. Connections
from the somatosensory cortex reach the orbitofrontal cortex directly and via
the insular cortex, as well as the amygdala via the insular cortex. TG, architectonic
area in the temporal pole; V4 is visual area 4. (Adapted from Rolls,
Chapter 5, Fig. 5.4.)